Cisco ASA 5510 Firewall : Basic Configuration Tutorial

By: Harris Andrea

Continuing our series of articles about Cisco ASA 5500 firewalls, I'm offering you here a basic configuration tutorial for the Cisco ASA 5510 security appliance. This device is the second model in the ASA series (ASA 5505, 5510, 5520 etc) and is fairly popular since is intended for small to medium enterprises. Like the smallest ASA 5505 model, the 5510 comes with two license options: The Base license and the Security Plus license. The second one (security plus) provides some performance and hardware enhancements over the base license, such as 130,000 Maximum firewall connections (instead of 50,000), 100 Maximum VLANs (instead of 50), Failover Redundancy, etc. Also, the security plus license enables two of the five firewall network ports to work as 10/100/1000 instead of only 10/100.

Next we will see a simple Internet Access scenario which will help us understand the basic steps needed to setup an ASA 5510. Assume that we are assigned a static public IP address 100.100.100.1 from our ISP. Also, the internal LAN network belongs to subnet 192.168.10.0/24. Interface Ethernet0/0 will be connected on the outside (towards the ISP), and Ethernet0/1 will be connected to the Inside LAN switch.

The firewall will be configured to supply IP addresses dynamically (using DHCP) to the internal hosts. All outbound communication (from inside to outside) will be translated using Port Address Translation (PAT) on the outside public interface. Let's see a snippet of the required configuration steps for this basic scenario:

Step1: Configure a privileged level password (enable password)
By default there is no password for accessing the ASA firewall, so the first step before doing anything else is to configure a privileged level password, which will be needed to allow subsequent access to the appliance. Configure this under Configuration Mode:

ASA5510(config)# enable password mysecretpassword

Step2: Configure the public outside interface
ASA5510(config)# interface Ethernet0/0
ASA5510(config-if)# nameif outside
ASA5510(config-if)# security-level 0
ASA5510(config-if)# ip address 100.100.100.1 255.255.255.252
ASA5510(config-if)# no shut

Step3: Configure the trusted internal interface
ASA5510(config)# interface Ethernet0/1
ASA5510(config-if)# nameif inside
ASA5510(config-if)# security-level 100
ASA5510(config-if)# ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0
ASA5510(config-if)# no shut

Step 4: Configure PAT on the outside interface
ASA5510(config)# global (outside) 1 interface
ASA5510(config)# nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0

Step 5: Configure Default Route towards the ISP (assume default gateway is 100.100.100.2)
ASA5510(config)# route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 100.100.100.2 1

Step 6: Configure the firewall to assign internal IP and DNS address to hosts using DHCP
ASA5510(config)# dhcpd dns 200.200.200.10
ASA5510(config)# dhcpd address 192.168.10.10-192.168.10.200 inside
ASA5510(config)# dhcpd enable inside

About the Author

Harris Andrea is a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) and Cisco Certified Security Professional (CCSP) with more than 10 years experience in the networking field. He is currently employed as a network security senior engineer in a leading ISP company in Europe. He has designed and implemented several projects involving Cisco ASA/PIX firewalls and other Cisco products and technologies. You can visit his website below for more information about Cisco products and solutions. You can also learn how to configure any Cisco ASA 5500 Firewall Here. Go ahead and check out Harris website for more Cisco configuration examples and other related details about designing and implementing Cisco solutions: Cisco Training.

(ArticlesBase SC #833644)

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